Tilbe Goksun

Koc University · Department of Psychology

Children comprehend iconic gestures relatively later than deictic gestures. Previous research with English‐learning children indicated that they could comprehend iconic gestures at 26 months, a pattern whose extension to other languages is not yet known. The present study examined Turkish‐learning children's iconic gesture comprehension and its rel...

This longitudinal study investigated parents’ different pretend play behaviors (substitution, animation, and role enactment) to their infants during free play and the bidirectional links with infants’ vocabulary development at 14 months (Time-1: N = 34, M age = 14.23 months) and 20 months (Time-2: N = 34, M age = 20.33 months), assessed by parental...

Co-speech hand gestures offer a rich avenue for research into studying emotion communication because they serve as both prominent expressive bodily cues and an integral part of language. Despite such a strategic relevance, gesture-speech integration and interaction have received less research focus on its emotional function compared to its cognitiv...

Children need to learn the demands of their native language in the early vocabulary development phase. In this dynamic process, parental multimodal input may shape neurodevelopmental trajectories while also being tailored by child‐related factors. Moving beyond typically characterized group profiles, in this article, we synthesize growing evidence...

This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children’s L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish causat...

Gesture and speech are tightly linked and form a single system in typical development. In this review, we ask whether and how the role of gesture and relations between speech and gesture vary in atypical development by focusing on two groups of children: those with peri‐ or prenatal unilateral brain injury (children with BI) and preterm born (PT) c...

Adaptive memory retains information that would increase survival chances and reproductive success, resulting in the survival processing effect. Less is known about whether the reliability of the information interacts with the survival processing effect. From an adaptive point, information from reliable sources should lead to better encoding of info...

People are more disfluent in their second language (L2) than their first language (L1). Gesturing facilitates cognitive processes, including speech production. This study investigates speech disfluency and representational gesture production across Turkish-English bilinguals' L1 (Turkish) and L2 (English) through a narrative retelling task (N = 27)...

Hand gestures play an integral role in multimodal language and communication. Even though the self-oriented functions of gestures, such as activating a speaker’s lexicon and maintaining visuospatial imagery, have been emphasized, gestures’ functions in creative thinking are not well-established. In the current study, we investigated the role of ico...

Temporal perspectives allow us to place ourselves and temporal events on a timeline, making it easier to conceptualize time. This study investigates how we take different temporal perspectives in our temporal gestures. We asked participants ( n = 36) to retell temporal scenarios written in the Moving‐Ego, Moving‐Time, and Time‐Reference‐Point persp...

Age-related effects are observed in both speech and gesture production. Older adults produce grammatically fewer complex sentences and use fewer iconic gestures than younger adults. This study investigated whether gesture use, especially iconic gesture production, was associated with the syntactic complexity within and across younger and older age...

Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children’s verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could...

Previous research has established that advances in spatial cognition predict STEAM success, and construction toys provide ample opportunities to foster spatial cognition. Despite various construction toy designs in the market, mostly brick-shaped building blocks are used in spatial cognition research. This group of toys is known to enhance mental r...

Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children's later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present...

Preschoolers have difficulties in relational reasoning tasks, which are usually attributed to their object focus. Object focus can be reduced by using basic shapes familiar to children and could differ across children. Therefore, in Experiment 1, we investigated 25 4-year-olds' performance in the relational match-to-sample task (RMTS), using basic...

Preschoolers have difficulties in relational reasoning tasks, which are usually attributed to their object focus. Object focus can be reduced by using basic shapes familiar to children and could differ across children. Therefore, in Experiment 1, we investigated 25 4-year-olds' performance in the relational match-to-sample task (RMTS), using basic...

Many training programs have aimed to improve creative thinking abilities in various settings. The study of relevant literature revealed a relatively lower number of creativity programs for children than those developed for adults. The current work introduces a new and comprehensive nine-week long creativity intervention program implemented (out of...

Reasoning about causal relations is essential for children's early cognitive development. The current study investigated 4-year-olds' (N = 58) reasoning about complex causal physical interactions in terms of predicting the endpoint of motion. In an online task, children were presented with four configurations that involved different interactions of...

Information can be conveyed via multiple channels such as verbal and gestural (visual) channels during communication. Sometimes the information from different channels does not match (e.g., saying right while pointing to the left). How do addressees choose which information to act upon in such cases? In two experiments, we investigated this issue b...

Gestures help speakers and listeners during communication and thinking, particularly for visual-spatial information. Speakers tend to use gestures to complement the accompanying spoken deictic constructions, such as demonstratives, when communicating spatial information (e.g., saying “The candle is here” and gesturing to the right side to express t...

Using hand gestures benefits children’s divergent thinking and enhances verbal improvisation in adults. In the present study, we asked whether gestures were also associated with convergent thinking by activating individuals’ verbal lexicon and maintaining their visuospatial imagery. We tested young adults on verbal and visual convergent thinking, c...

Language about time is an integral part of how we spatialize time. Factors like temporal focus can be related to time spatialization as well. The current study investigates the role of language in how we spatialize time, using a temporal diagram task modified to include the lateral axis. We asked participants to place temporal events provided in no...

Language-dependent recall refers to the language-specific retrieval of memories in which the retrieval success depends on the match between the languages of encoding and retrieval. The present study investigated language-dependent recall in terms of memory accuracy, false memory, and episodic memory characteristics in the free recall of fictional s...

Gesturing might enhance creative thinking. Our study shows that iconic gestures are associated with fluency and elaboration of ideas. However, overall gesturing frequency might impair flexible thinking and does not contribute to the originality of ideas. Hence, it is important to adopt a multifaceted approach when studying gestures and creativity.

Bilingual and monolingual children might have different styles of using multimodal language. This study investigates speech disfluency and gesture production of 5-and 7-year-old Turkish monolingual (N = 61) and Turkish-English bilingual children (N = 51). We examined monolinguals' Turkish narratives and bilinguals' Turkish and English narratives. R...

This study aimed to examine whether the metacognitive system monitors the potential positive effects of gestures on spatial thinking. Participants (N = 59, 31F, Mage = 21.67) performed a mental rotation task, consisting of twenty-four problems varying in difficulty, and evaluated their confidence in their answers to problems in either gesture or co...

It is well known that infants undergo developmental change in how they respond to language-relevant visual contrasts. For example, when viewing motion events, infants’ sensitivities to background information (“ground-path cues,” e.g., whether a background is flat and continuous or bounded) change with age. Prior studies with English and Japanese mo...

Speakers employ co-speech gestures when thinking and speaking; however, gesture’s role in autobiographical episodic representations is not known. Based on the gesture-for-conceptualization framework, we propose that gestures, particularly representational ones, support episodic event representations by activating existing episodic elements and caus...

Information can be conveyed via multiple channels such as verbal and gestural (visual) channels during communication. Sometimes the information from different channels do not match (e.g., saying right while pointing to the left). How do addressees choose which information to act upon in such cases? In two experiments, we investigated this issue by...

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at age...

We communicate emotions in a multimodal way, yet non-verbal emotion communication is a relatively understudied area of research. In three experiments, we investigated the role of gesture characteristics (e.g., type, size in space) on individuals’ processing of emotional content. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the emotional intensi...

Preschoolers’ early-math development is vital for their later math and academic achievement. Tangible user interfaces (TUI) may support early math as they feature physical objects imperative to math development and multimedia to support engagement. As a potentially meaningful context for TUIs, developmental studies highlight the need to support the...

Bilinguals tend to produce more co-speech hand gestures to compensate for reduced communicative proficiency when speaking in their L2. We here investigated L1-Turkish and L2-English speakers’ gesture use in an emotional context. We specifically asked whether and how (1) speakers gestured differently while retelling L1 vs. L2 and positive vs. negati...

This study examines how properties of path (the trajectory of motion) and manner (how an action is performed) components of motion events are reflected in linguistic and nonlinguistic motion event conceptualization in a path-focused language, Turkish. In two experiments, we investigated how path and manner differed in salience (i.e., prominence) an...

In the present study, we looked at the interaction between gestures, convergent thinking, and mental imagery. Convergent thinking is a type of creative thinking where one has to find the best possible solution to a problem by connecting remotely associated ideas. We tested 80 young adults in a gesture-spontaneous and a gesture-encouraged condition...

This study examined the relation between characteristics of parental input, particularly focusing on questions and pointing gestures directed to toddlers during book reading, and toddlers' elicited and spontaneous communicative interactions. A total of 30 Turkish speaking parents and their toddlers (18 girls, Mage = 18.79 SDage = 1.55) were observe...

Sound symbols, such as “woof woof” for a dog's barking, imitate the physical properties of their referents. Turkish is a sound symbolically rich language that allows flexible use of such words in different linguistic forms. The current study examined Turkish‐speaking parents' use of sound symbolic words to their 14‐ and 20‐month‐olds and the concur...

Gestures facilitate speech production by helping speakers reduce cognitive load. Studies on gesture-speech interaction mostly examined the effect of representational gestures on spatial contexts. However, abstract deictics (e.g., pointing at objects that are not visually present) might also have a role in facilitating cognitive processes. The...

Imagery abilities have a fundamental role in the creative process. Recently, hand gestures have been shown to benefit creative idea generation. Gestures are a good candidate for enhancing creativity because they help us maintain and manipulate visuospatial imagery. The present study tested young adults (N=59) on the Test of Creative Imagery Abiliti...

The kitchen is one of the busiest and messiest hubs of a home, where the hands are usually spoiled with food. In this setting, gestural interaction can offer several advantages: efficient, intuitive, and touch-free orchestration of interactive devices. Yet, research scarcely investigates the user's perspective on gesture-based systems in the kitche...

Does temporal thought extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? Do asymmetries depend on cultural differences in temporal focus? Some studies suggest that people in Western (arguably future-focused) cultures perceive the future as being closer, more valued, and deeper than the past (a future asymmetry), while the opposite is shown in East...

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of causal language on causal events in three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere ‘to feed’). In Turk...

Purpose We investigated interrelations among speech, co-speech gestures, and visual attention in first language (L1)-Turkish second language (L2)-English speakers’ descriptions of motion events. We asked whether young adults differed in their spoken, gestural expressions, and visual attention toward event components of manner (how an action is perf...

Do some individuals benefit more from social robots than others? Using a second language (L2) vocabulary lesson as an example, this study examined how individual differences in attitudes toward robots, anxiety in learning L2, and personality traits may be related to the learning outcomes. One hundred and two native Turkish-speaking adults were taug...

Age-related changes are observed in the speech and gestures of neurotypical individuals. Older adults are more disfluent in speech and use fewer representational gestures (e.g., holding two hands close to each other to mean small), compared to younger adults. Using gestures, especially representational gestures, is common in difficult tasks to aid...

Cross‐category hues are differentiated easier than otherwise equidistant hues that belong to the same linguistic category. This effect is typically manifested through both accuracy and response time gains in tasks with a memory component, whereas only response times are affected when there is no memory component. This raises the question of whether...

Language development is intertwined with motor development. This study examined how visual processing might mediate the relation between language development and motor skills in preterm (PT, n = 34, Mean gestational age = 30 weeks) and full-term infants (FT, n = 35, Mean gestational age = 38.9 weeks) at 13 months of age. Infants’ visual processing,...

Children’s spontaneous speech may not reflect true productivity with grammar rules. We investigated Turkish-learning children’s rule-based understanding of causative morphology by combining experimental and corpus work. We asked (1) when the generalization of causative morphology emerges and (2) what role input plays in this development. To answer...

How does parental causal input relate to children's later comprehension of causal verbs? Causal constructions in verbs differ across languages. Turkish has both lexical and morphological causatives. We asked whether (1) parental causal language input varied for different types of play (guided vs. free play), (2) early parental causal language input...

This chapter focuses on all four categories of co-speech gesture such as iconic, metaphoric, deictic, and beat. It reviews the impact of aging on general language and cognitive abilities and how they might relate to gesture use and comprehension in older adults in light of different gesture theories. The chapter addresses gesture use and comprehens...

This study examined how impairments in sensorimotor abilities of individuals with Parkinson's Disease (PD) can be related to the use and understanding of co-speech hand gestures involving literal and figurative actions. We tested individuals with PD (n = 18, 12 males, Mage = 56.5, SDage = 8.16, PD duration since onset: M = 5.36 years, SD = 3.51, Ho...

Card sorting tests are commonly used to evaluate individual differences in task shifting skills, which are composed of multiple components. Each component follows a unique developmental trajectory and is shaped by the individual differences in various capacities, including some non-EF variables such as basic numeracy skills (the understanding of pa...

Observing gestures facilitate listeners’ comprehension, especially for visual-spatial information. However, people differ in how and to what extent they benefit from gestures depending on their visual-spatial abilities. This study examined whether and how spatial skills (i.e., mental rotation) relate to how much listeners benefit from observing ges...

Young children have difficulties in understanding untypical causal relations. Although we know that hearing a causal description facilitates this understanding, less is known about what particular features of causal language are responsible for this facilitation. Here, we asked two questions. First, do syntactic and morphological cues in the gramma...

Object word learning can be based on infant-related factors such as their manual actions and socio-linguistic factors such as parental input. Specific input for spatial features (i.e., size, shape, features of objects) can be related to object word comprehension in early vocabulary development. In a longitudinal study, we investigated whether fine...

This study used an online second language (L2) vocabulary lesson to evaluate whether the physical body (i.e., embodiment) of a robot tutor has an impact on how the learner learns from the robot. In addition, we tested how individual differences in attitudes toward robots, first impressions of the robot, anxiety in learning L2, and personality trait...

This study investigated whether crosslinguistic differences in the expression of causality influence causal conceptualization of observed events in 3- to 4-year-old Swiss-German-learners and Turkish-learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed lexically (e.g., schniidä “to cut”). In Turkish, causality is expressed both lexically, and mo...

Background: Coding has been added to school curricula in several countries, being one of the necessary competencies of the 21st century. Although it has also been suggested to foster the development of several cognitive skills such as computational thinking and problem-solving, studies on the effects of coding are very limited, provide mixed resul...

Young children have difficulties understanding untypical causal relations. While we know that hearing a causal description facilitates this understanding, less is known about what particular features of causal language are responsible for this facilitation. Here, we asked: (1) Do syntactic and morphological cues in the grammatical structure of sent...

Spatial skills predict important life outcomes, such as mathematical achievement or entrance into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Children significantly vary in their spatial performance even before they enter formal schooling. One correlate of children's spatial performance is the spatial language they produce...

Aging has effects both in language and gestural communication skills. Even though gesture use is similar between younger and older adults, the use of representational gestures (e.g., drawing a line with fingers on the air to indicate a road) decreases with age. This study investigates whether this change in the production of representational gestur...

There is a consensus that spatial language supports spatial reasoning. However, it remains a question of how specific spatial terms (e.g., prepositions) relate to distinct spatial skills that are critical for spatial cognition (e.g., mental transformation). We asked whether 1) preschoolers’ spatial language skills, particularly knowledge of postpos...

Social robots are receiving an ever-increasing interest in popular media and scientific literature. Yet, empirical evaluation of the educational use of social robots remains limited. In the current paper, we focus on how different scaffolds (co-speech hand gestures vs. visual cues presented on the screen) influence the effectiveness of a robot seco...

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and deep learning have revived the interest in studying the gap between the reasoning capabilities of humans and machines. In this ongoing work, we introduce CRAFT, a new visual question answering dataset that requires causal reasoning about physical forces and object interactions. It contains 38K video an...

Speakers use spontaneous hand gestures as they speak and think. These gestures serve many functions for speakers who produce them as well as for listeners who observe them. To date, studies in the gesture literature mostly focused on group-comparisons or the external sources of variation to examine when people use, process, and benefit from using a...

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is one of the most widely used complex EF task for various populations. However, it seems questionable to employ the task for preschool-aged children due to their lack of numerical efficiency while sorting cards according to the number dimension. The present study aimed to examine the association of numeracy s...

Do gestures facilitate lexical access particularly when speech production is not fluent? This study investigates gesture and disfluency rates and patterns when individuals describe concrete and abstract paintings and asks whether gestures facilitate speech by resolving disfluencies. Turkish-speaking participants (N=30) were asked to describe three...

Digital tools provide unique ways to support young language learners. To design and use these tools effectively, their strengths and shortcomings must be carefully evaluated. This chapter addresses how digital tools may transform the nature of social and physical interaction of children, focusing on vocabulary and narrative development in first and...

The present study investigated how informativeness of gestures in different speech contexts modulates direct visual attention to gestures. We asked whether listeners gazed at gestures more when they expressed complementary vs. redundant information to the accompanying speech in a spatial comprehension task. We found that listeners allocated more di...

You can see this talk presentation here: https://youtu.be/YVVEpa4Smr8